"Sincerest Apologies"

An account of recent events on Writer's Cafe.

It's early morning, no one else is awake. The house is still, but I can feel my fingers itching. They long to attack the key board of my red iMac and send forth something new into the Blue Nowhere of cyber whatever. I answer the call.

I sit at my desk and turn on the dinosaur. It hums to life and goes through all it's starting procedures. I click on my FireFox icon and get the internet up and running. Without much hesitation, I'm surfing through my usual sites. checking my space for anything new. Seeing if anyone is online at yahoo. Finally, I log into my hotmail account. Of the ten or so messages that have been waiting for me, one stands out and demands that I click on it first.

"Sincerest Apologies" the header reads. For some reason, my heart skips a beat. I just know that this is not a pleasantry or some one being polite. Something terrible has happened.

Click!

It's from Charlie, some one I don't really know, but now have a great dislike for. He's saying that after a long day of programing to make Writers Cafe more efficient, he made an "errant click of the mouse". Boom! Catastrophe!! Everyone's hard work has bee deleted.

I can't believe what my eyes are telling me. all my work, all my poetry and stories. All of it. Just gone... I move over to my Writers Cafe account and see that this isn't some sick joke. It's the unbearable truth. My account shows not one pixel, not one letter of type.

How can this be? How could a programmer be so careless? Why didn't he back up his work? Why wasn't The Cafe backed up to the hilt?

None of that matters now. All that matters is that all my work is gone. I have poems here that don't exist anywhere else. Short stories that would have been great. Only a handful was saved onto my computer as I was using The Cafe as my cache. Now I have nothing.

I'm exposed and naked, my work was my protection, and now it's all gone. I'm crying, mourning the loss of "My Potential", "Damn Cat", "Vengence", "Ode To A Mike's Hard Lemonade". There are more, so many more that I will never again see. Almost thirty pieces were stored here, pieces that I will never again see, that I will never have the joy of seeing published in a collection. Gone forever, lost to the harsh fingers of error.

Thanks, Charlie. You have ruined me and my work. A part of my soul is missing. a part of my heart vanished the moment I read that email. I lost the culmination of years of refinement and hard work! What I had posted here was some of my best work! And you lost it... I want my soul back, I want my hert back, I want my work back.

Sincerest Apologies My A*s...
N. Strong

Reviews

[The Elder]

I was a member here then, under a different pen name of course.
You brilliantly expressed what, I believe, all of us were feeling that
long ago day. You've expressed our feelings of panic, of despair, of
anger and loss.
Very well written.

[B. Lapinski]

excellent.